In the May 11 & 25 SN: High-tech cricket farming, AI learns from Minecraft, looking for lithium, a new hominid species is named, signs of life in dead pig brains, Cherokee cave texts decoded, water molecules on the moon and more.

Long-running lunar mission reveals moon’s surprises

After 7 years, orbiter team asks NASA for two more

MOON MOUNTAINS A 15-kilometer-wide complex of mountains rises 2 kilometers above the center of Tycho Crater on the moon in this 2011 picture from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

LRO/GSFC/NASA, Arizona State Univ.

Not all cosmic mysteries lie light-years away. Some secrets are being unearthed on our nearest neighbor, about a quarter of a million miles from home.

For almost seven years, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been keeping a close eye on the moon. During its tenure, the spacecraft has cataloged craters, pinpointed subsurface deposits of water ice and found evidence of recent volcanic activity. It has even witnessed crashes by three other spacecraft. (One, LCROSS, launched a plume of ejecta from the south pole that scientists searched for water vapor.)

“No other mission has orbited the moon for as long as LRO has,” says Noah Petro, a geologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Constant lunar vigilance has “really pushed our understanding of how the moon changes today, over the last billion years and what happened early on.” A

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